Dutch Interior

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Time can feel interminable until you meet the right person. When Jack Nugent, Conner Reeves, Shane Barton, Hayden Barton, Davis Stewart, and Noah Kurtz started making music together as Dutch Interior, the lifelong friends living between houses in Los Angeles and Long Beach had been in and out of each other’s lives for the better part of two decades. Beginning as a fluid experiment of songs born in the moment, initial recordings Kindergarten and Blinded By Fame trace an uncanny and distinctive world of their own design. The best relationships come easy, and these live-from-tape sketches were the product of a creative union brought on by already-established trust and familiar insularity. The band’s Fat Possum debut Moneyball examines where they go from here. Indulging in the possibility of conventional fantasy as much as it treads with the unease of an incalculable future, Moneyball considers what it means to have universal desires that can feel as absurd as they are essential: to love, settle down, and aspire to greatness as they teeter on the edge of all the possibilities of what could happen next.

While Moneyball is punctuated by uncertainty, at its core it is still tethered to the inherently spiritual relationship the bandmates have not only with each other, but with the world that surrounds them. Recorded over a six-month period in their Long Beach studio, the ten songs that make up the record find cohesion “not just in the art but the physical space”: the band’s self-made studio as well as their longstanding friendships. Produced by Reeves and mixed by Phil Ek (Modest Mouse, Duster, Fleet Foxes), you can begin to pick up the separate stylings and personalities of the band members by the songs they independently write (five out of the six band members have vocal and lyrical credits on the record) before bringing to the band at large, where the songs often grow into new forms all together. Despite this individual approach to songwriting, they describe each other as “branches of the same core life” whose colliding influences and experience all bleed into the songs.

Davis promotes shows across Los Angeles and is the creative eye of the group, collecting images and spearheading visual content and videos. Noah is a classically trained pianist and Shane has gone viral on social media for elaborate hoax videos. Multiple band members are avid surfers, and Jack moonlights as a rock climber who also spent two years living out of his van in the middle of the country. Conner produces all of the band’s music as well as for others and Hayden has been drumming since he was eight. It’s their devotion to all forms of art that has lead to the band as the centerpiece. Together and apart, they watch films, cook and listen to a breadth of musical genres spanning ambient, slowcore, experimental folk, alt country, jazz, southern rock and all forms of dance music. These disparate influences converge on Moneyball, which shapeshifts and oscillates between alternative country, sharply hewn indie rock and hints of dissonant ambience, all while still sounding like a band who both speak their own private language and translate it into something universal.

“We wanted to acknowledge that we exist in a tradition of American music and take that to places that are personal to us. It’s like we renovated an old house and then invited people in.” The ten songs are an expansion of the six-piece’s own history, a hyper-specific lore that can both recede and reappear into an endless loop of the landscape that surrounds them. They often zero in on minute, mundane details with a peculiar degree of affectation. The narrator of the crackling, threadbare “Christ on the Mast” imagines a projection of a long-term fellow apartment resident wandering around downtown Los Angeles alone and the “cultural homogeneity of experiencing the world with other people” that entails. Nugent, who was studying for a masters in English Literature at the time the album was recorded, cites the novel The Country of the Pointed Firs in which an old man keeps his wife’s room exactly the same after her death, watching the ocean every day with a misplaced aspiration that she would reemerge. All of Dutch Interior are internalized romantics, enraptured with fragmented moments that appear almost slapdash in their lyrics as well as the naive belief in human connection as the only way to save ourselves.

Midway through the record, Dutch Interior deliver their own inspired allusion to the Allman Brothers’ “Jessica” with the finger-plucking “Sweet Time.” It’s an infectiously joyous and simple interlude that captures the luxury of time, “and how crushing that feels, and the people around you that can similarly make that fade away.” The frayed Americana of the lead single “Fourth Street” references the Fourth Street corridor where their first record was made, in the living room of an apartment where three of the band members lived and three others still do, while the eerie, ambling “Life (So Crazy),” constructed out of feedback loops on a mixer, is an elegy to days spent with another close companion. Live, the songs become even more expansive and uninhibited, and although it shouldn’t always make sense, every track sounds naturally aligned side by side. The band reflects on their experimental approach to tradition on the songs that comprise Moneyball, describing “a fucked-up Fleetwood Mac song” (“Sandcastle Molds”) or “a three chord Neil Young song but with a Sparklehorse bassline” (“Wood Knot”).

In the same way artists like Wilco or Lucinda Williams have turned classic songwriting on its head, Moneyball finds its way through its own humorous twists and turns, alongside an undercurrent of omnipresent, steadfast declarations of love. It’s this stark romanticism that makes the music of the band expand outside the confines of the spaces they dwell into something more universally compelling, a manifestation of hope and faith that, together, they can create something bigger than themselves. Or maybe it’s not that deep: in “Horse,” Reeves dreams of a simpler life, in the countryside with kids and a maxed-out credit card. “Live, laugh, love,” he sighs earlier on in the record; “plant my ass / deeper than a root.”

Much like the original Dutch Interiors, a series of three surrealist paintings by the artist Joan Miro in 1928 that are of themselves reimagining’s of their original works, the band continue to ruminate on the permanence of anything and everything, and the inescapable conclusion that change ushers on whether we’re ready or not. It’s a feeling that remains with you long after the music stops playing. But in this heightened fragility also exists the band’s shared vision that if we dig our heels in, and nourish the relationships that bind us, a brighter version of the future emerges. Dutch Interior have made it this far together. “In the countryside, is where we’ll die,” Nugent imagines, an almost crass optimism that suggests either blind faith or a risk that will ultimately pay off. In Moneyball, it’s worth a shot.

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